On 4 January 2013 09:02, Mark A. Hershberger mah@everybody.org wrote:
Would it be possible to adapt the Visual Editor to run under 1.19?
Possible? Yes. However, it would involve back-porting a number of changes that have been made to core since then (and will no-doubt continue to be added as we discover new ways in which MW assumes that "editing" and "EditPage.php" are the same thing). For some quick examples, and https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/36237/ and https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/37191/ (which are both in 1.21 wmf5) - though I'm sure there are more out there. I worry that you'd end up needing to create 1.19.4-ve_support branches that would be no easier than pushing to a 1.21 bleeding-edge branch, sadly.
I have a couple of reasons for wanting that:
- 1.19 is our LTS release. Visual Editor looks awesome and I'd like to
provide people who are stuck on older versions of MediaWiki with a persuasive reason to upgrade to 1.19 at least.
Understood (though I didn't know about 1.19 being an LTS release; who is doing the supporting, exactly, and what does 'support' entail here? [*] is unclear…).
However, VE is very much in alpha at this stage, and we do not generally recommend MediaWiki sysadmins trying to install it if they're not running the kind of setup that is pulling 1.21 pre-branches from git every now and then; it's far too likely that VE will have serious bugs that our fortnightly pushes will need to fix, let alone the improvements and new features we'll (hopefully!) be releasing quite frequently. By the time VE is stable enough to recommend, we will probably have a new LTS release by then (indeed, how does that get determined?).
- FCKeditor is no longer supported for MediaWiki, but people are still
using it and, for some reason, like what it provides. If we can make the Visual Editor available to them, I'm hoping the need for FCKeditor will disappear.
As a former sysadmin of an FCKeditor-using MW installation, I too look forward to the point when VE is sufficiently stable and functional that it's included in the default tarball, and FCK is no longer considered by anyone. :-)
There is a dependency on Parsoid and node.js, of course, that a FCKeditor doesn't need, but I'm assuming right now that if MediaWiki works with the extension, then the Parsoid instance will just run.
As Gabriel said, Parsoid's dependencies on MediaWiki are a lot less bleeding-edge (at least, right now), and mostly use the long-established APIs. It's possible that this will change in future, though of course we'd rather avoid this if we can.
I'll be setting up and testing Visual Editor soon and start looking at what is needed to get it running against 1.19 and begin to see how feasible that even is.
Is anyone else interested in helping to make this happen?
[*] - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Tarball_maintenance
J. -- James D. Forrester Product Manager, VisualEditor Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester